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All products go through a life-cycle. However, the genius of an organization lies in how to manage the life-cycle of the product and extend it as necessary to serve the customers. Thus, it is not merely the wizardry in technology and manufacturing that determine the ultimate longevity of the product in the market and the mind share of the customer. The product has to respond to the diversity of demands determined by disposable income, demographics, geography, etc. In business school speak, we say that this is part of market segmentation coupled with the appropriate marketing message. However, there is not an explicit strategy formulated around identifying

Corporate Culture

Extended Culture

To achieve success, firms increasingly must develop products by leveraging ad coordinating broad creative capabilities and resources, which often are diffused across geographical and cultural boundaries. But what we have to explore is a lot more than that from the incipient stages that a product has imagined: How do we instill unique corporate DNA into the product that immediately marks the product with a corporate signature? In addition, how do we built out a product that is tenable across the farthest reaches of geography and cultural diversity?

Thus, an innovative approach is called for in product development … particularly, in a global context. The approach entails getting cross-disciplinary teams in liberal arts, science, business, etc. to work together to gather deeper insights into the cultural strains that drive decisions in various markets. To reiterate, there is no one particular function that is paramount: all of them have to work and improvise together while ensuring that there are channels that gather feedback. The cross disciplinary team and the institutionalization of a feedback mechanism that can be quickly acted upon are the key parameters to ensure that the right product is in the market and that it will be extended accordingly to the chatter of the crowds.

Having said that, this is hardly news! A lot of companies are well on their way to instill these factors into product design and development. Companies have created organizational architectures in the corporate structure in a manner that culturally appropriate products are developed and maintained in dispersed local markets. However, in most instances, we have also seen that the way they view this is to have local managers run the show, with the presumption that these “culturally appropriate” products will make good in those markets. But along the way, the piece that dissembles over time on account of creating the local flavor is that the product may not mirror the culture that the corporate group wants to instill. If these two are not aptly managed and balanced, islands of conflict will be created. Thus, my contention is that a top-down value mandate ought to set the appropriate parameters inside which the hotbed of collaborative activity would take place for product design and development in various markets.

Thus the necessary top down value systems that would bring culture into products would be:

Open areas for employees to express their thoughts and ideas

Diversity of people with different skill sets in product teams will contribute to product development

Encouraging internal and external speakers to expound upon the product touch points in the community.

Empowerment and recognition systems.

Proper formulation of monetary incentives to inspire and maintain focus.

Consider this. Your professional career is a series of projects. Employers look for accountability and performance, and they measure you by how you fare on your projects. Everything else, for the most part, is white noise. The projects you work on establish your skill set and before long – your career trajectory. However, all the great stuff that you have done at work is for the most part hidden from other people in your company or your professional colleagues. You may get a recommendation on LinkedIn, which is fairly high-level, or you may receive endorsements for your skills, which is awesome. But the Endorsements on LinkedIn seem a little random, don’t they? Wouldn’t it be just awesome to recognize, or be recognized by, your colleagues for projects that you have worked on. We are sure that there are projects that you have worked on that involves third-party vendors, consultants, service providers, clients, etc. – well, now you have a forum to send and receive recognition, in a beautiful form factor, that you can choose to display across your networks.

Imagine an employee review. You must have spent some time thinking through all the great stuff that you have done that you want to attach to your review form. And you may have, in your haste, forgotten some of the great stuff that you have done and been recognized for informally. So how cool would it be to print or email all the projects that you’ve worked on and the recognition you’ve received to your manager? How cool would it be to send all the people that you have recognized for their phenomenal work? For in the act of participating in the recognition ecosystem that our application provides you – you are an engaged and prized employee that any company would want to retain, nurture and develop.

Now imagine you are looking for a job. You have a resume. That is nice. And then the potential employer or recruiter is redirected to your professional networks and they have a glimpse of your recommendations and skill sets. That is nice too! But seriously…wouldn’t it be better for the hiring manager or recruiter to have a deeper insight into some of the projects that you have done and the recognition that you have received? Wouldn’t it be nice for them to see how active you are in recognizing great work of your other colleagues and project co-workers? Now they would have a more comprehensive idea of who you are and what makes you tick.

We help you build your professional brand and convey your accomplishments. That translates into greater internal development opportunities in your company, promotion, increase in pay, and it also makes you more marketable. We help you connect to high-achievers and forever manage your digital portfolio of achievements that can, at your request, exist in an open environment. JuggleStars.com is a great career management tool.

Please support Jugglestars. This is an Alpha Release. Use the application in your organization. The Jugglestars team will be adding in more features over the next few months. Give them your feedback. They are an awesome team with great ideas. Please click on www.jugglestars.com and you can open an account, go to Account Settings and setup your profile and then you are pretty much ready to go to recognize your team and your colleagues at a project level.

Founded in 2012, JuggleStars provides professionals the ability to share and recognize success and broadcast recognition at varying levels of granularity across a wide array of social platforms. We enable the professionals to manage their brand and maintain and grow their digital portfolio of achievements. Our vision is to make all of the active professionals in our network become lighthouses in the global talent marketplace.

To that end, we believe that there are four tightly intertwined components in play to make this possible.

1. Rich User Experience: It is important for us to create a rich user experience to encourage users to use our application and reward their bosses, subordinates, peers and third-party vendors – all of the folk who make the life of the professional just a little easier and better. To that end, we have adopted some of the common social networking principles, user experience and general interactivity to allow quicker adoption and integration of users into the JuggleStars community. We will continue to hone and sharpen our focus, while being more inclined toward minimalism that advances the core value proposition to the user.

2. Tools: We will provide tools integrated into the rich user experience. Being bootstrapped has afforded us very little headroom to give you all that we think you would really find helpful, but our goal is to do our best to give you the tools to be able to manage your brand better. With your support and generosity, we can certainly accelerate what we can provide to you, and we hope that we can demonstrate the power of the web together to create a meaningful and impactful solution via a set of tools that will endure and stand the test of time.

3. Fun: We are a team that wants to introduce fun in the application. We have as a team worked together to integrate HR, Gaming, Recognition, Open Platform in a manner such that we introduce a healthy spirit of competition and fun while you use our application. Trust us! We are also trying to figure out ways in which you may not have to use our application. We have left you wondering now, haven’t we? Well, stay tuned.

4. Social Good: Great people do great things. They are the lighthouses for talent. They are the anchors in an organization. They fuel positivity and engagement and al’esprit de corps. They set the standards of excellence. They are the power brokers. They are the gateways that have achieved thresholds of excellence. They are the switch hitters; You can count on them to be the last ones standing. They face adversity with a smile. And most importantly, they are humble and they do not forget that they belong to a much larger community and they want to give back …if not for themselves, for the future generations. They are the lighthouses that look beyond the ocean and we are committed to provide tools to help them advance their aspirational and ideal motives that make a difference. We are with you all the way.

“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently. “

– Andy Hertzfield on Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field.

Many of us have heard the word – Reality Distortion Field. The term has been attributed to Steve Jobs who was widely known to have communicated messages to his constituency in a manner such that the reality of the situation was supplanted by him packaging the message so that people would take the bait and pursue paths that would, upon closer investigation, be dissonant from reality. But having been an avid acolyte of Jobs, I would imagine that he himself would be disturbed and unsettled by the label. Since when did the promise of a radiant future constitute a Reality Distortion Field? Since when did the ability of a person to embrace what seemingly is impossible and far-fetched and instill confidence in the troops to achieve it constitute a Reality Distortion Field? Since when did the ability of leadership to share in the wonders of unique and disruptive creations constitute a Reality Distortion Field? Since when did dreams of a better future underpinned with executable actions to achieve it constitute a Reality Distortion Field?

The Reality Distortion Field usage reflects the dissonance between what is and what needs to be. It is a slapstick term which suggests that you are envisioning tectonic dissonance rifts between reality and possibilities and that you are leading the awestruck starry-eyed followers off a potential cliff. Some people have renamed RDF as hype of Bulls*#t. They believe that RDF is extremely bad for organizations because it pushes the people outside the comfort zone of physical and logical constraints and is a recipe for disaster. The argument continues that organizations that are grounded upon the construct of reality and to communicate the same are essential to advance the organization. I beg to differ.

So let me address this on two fronts: RDF label and if we truly accept what RDF means … then my position is that it is the single most important attribute that a strong leader ought to embrace in the organization.

The RDF label:

We all know this to be true: A rose by any other name is still a rose. We just happen to call this rose in this context a RDF. It is presumed to be the ability of a person to cast possibilities in a different light … so much so that the impossibilities are reduced to elements just within the grasp of reality. Now I ask you – What is wrong with that? For a leader to be able to cast their vision within the inimitable grasp of an organization is a huge proxy for the faith of the leader of the people in the organization. If a project realistically would take 3 months but a RDF is cast to get a project done in 15 days – that is a tall order – but think of the consequences if people are “seduced” into the RDF and hence acts upon it. It immediately unfolds new pathways of collaboration, unforeseen discoveries into super-efficient and effective methods, it creates trench camaraderie, it distills focus into singularity points to be executed against, it instills and ignites a passion and an engagement around the new stakes in the ground, people become keepers of one another for a consequential and significant conquest, it brings out the creative energies and the limitless possibilities, once the goal is accomplished, of disruptive innovation in means and ends. Of course, one could also counter-argue a plethora of incidental issues in such cases: employees would burn out under the burden of unrealistic goals, employees are set more for failing than succeeding, it would create a disorderly orientation upon groups working together to meet RDF standards, and if one were to fall short …it would be a last straw that may break the camel’s back. So essentially this speaks to the ordinal magnitude of the RDF schema that is being pushed out by leadership.

RDF and the beneficial impact to an organization:

It is the sine qua non of great leadership to be able to push organizations beyond the boundaries of plain convenience. I have, in my career, been fortunate to have been challenged and on many occasions, forced out of my comfort zone. But in having done so successfully on many occasions, it has also given me the confidence to scale mountains. And that confidence is a perquisite that the organization leadership has to provide on a daily basis. After all, one of the biggest assets that an employee in an organization ought to have is pride and sense of accomplishment to their work. RDF unfolds that possibility.

We hear of disruptive innovations. These are defined as innovations that leapfrog the bounds of technology inertia. How does a company enable that? It is certainly not incremental thinking. It is a vision that marginally lies outside our aggregated horizon of sight. The age today which is a result of path breaking ideas and execution have been a result of those visionaries that have aimed beyond the horizons, instilled faith amongst the line men to align and execute, and made the impossible possible. We ought to thank our stars for having leaders that emit an RDF and lead us off our tenebrous existence in our diurnal professional lives.

There is absolutely no doubt that such leadership would create resistance and fierce antipathy among some. But despite some of the ill effects, the vector that drives great innovations lies in the capacity of the organization to embrace degrees of RDF to hasten and make the organizations competitive, distinctive and powerful.

Most of you today have heard the word “pivot”. It has become a very ubiquitous word – it pretends to be something which it is not. And entrepreneurs and VC’s have found oodles of reasons to justify that word. Some professional CXO’s throw that word around in executive meetings, board meetings, functional meetings … somehow they feel that these are one of the few words that give them gravitas. So “pivot” has become the sexy word – it portrays that the organization and the management is flexible and will iterate around its axis quickly to accommodate new needs … in fact, they would change direction altogether for the good of the company and the customers. After all, agility is everything, isn’t it? And couple that with Lean Startup – the other Valley buzz word … and you have created a very credible persona. (I will deal with the Lean Startup in a later blog and give that its due. As a matter of fact, the concept of “pivot” was introduced by Eric Ries who has also introduced the concept of Lean Startup).

Pivots happen when the company comes out with product that is not the right fit to market. They assess that customers want something different. Tweaking the product to fit the needs of the customer does not constitute a pivot. But if you change the entire product or direction of the company – that would be considered a pivot.

It gives examples of eight entrepreneurs who believe that they have exercised pivot in their business model. But if you read the case studies closely, none of them did. They tweaked and tweaked and tweaked along the way. The refined their model. Scripted.com appears to be the only example that comes closest to the concept of the “pivot” as understood in the Valley.

Customer problem pivot. In this scenario, you use essentially the same product to solve a different problem for the same customer segment. Eric says that Starbucks famously did this pivot when they went from selling coffee beans and espresso makers to brewing drinks in-house.

Market segment pivot. This means you take your existing product and use it to solve a similar problem for a different set of customers. This may be necessary when you find that consumers aren’t buying your product, but enterprises have a similar problem, with money to spend. Sometimes this is more a marketing change than a product change.

Technology pivot. Engineers always fight to take advantage of what they have built so far. So the most obvious pivot for them is to repurpose the technology platform, to make it solve a more pressing, more marketable, or just a more solvable problem as you learn from customers.

Product feature pivot. Here especially, you need to pay close attention to what real customers are doing, rather than your projections of what they should do. It can mean to zoom-in and remove features for focus, or zoom-out to add features for a more holistic solution.

Revenue model pivot. One pivot is to change your focus from a premium price, customized solution, to a low price commoditized solution. Another common variation worth considering is the move from a one-time product sale to monthly subscription or license fees. Another is the famous razor versus blade strategy.

Sales channel pivot. Startups with complex new products always seem to start with direct sales, and building their own brand. When they find how expensive and time consuming this is, they need to use what they have learned from customers to consider a distribution channel, ecommerce, white-labeling the product, and strategic partners.

Product versus services pivot. Sometimes products are too different or too complex to be sold effectively to the customer with the problem. Now is the time for bundling support services with the product, education offerings, or simply making your offering a service that happens to deliver a product at the core.

Major competitor pivot. What do you do when a major new player or competitor jumps into your space? You can charge ahead blindly, or focus on one of the above pivots to build your differentiation and stay alive.

Now please re-read all of the eight different types of “pivot” carefully! And reread again. What do you see? What do you find if you reflect upon these further? None of these are pivots! None! All of the eight items fit better into Porter’s Competition Framework. You are not changing direction. You are not suddenly reimagining a new dawn. You are simply tweaking as you learn more. So the question is – Is the rose by any other name still a rose? The answer is yes! Pivot means changing direction … in fact, so dramatically that the vestiges of the early business models fade away from living memory. And there have been successful pivots in recent business history. But less so … and for those who did, you will likely have not heard of them at all. They have long been discarded in the ash heap of history.

Great companies are established by leaders that have vision. The vision is the aspirational goal of the company. The vision statement reflects the goal in a short and succinct manner. Underlying the vision, they incorporate principles, values, missions, objectives … but they also introduce a corridor of uncertainty. Why? Because the future is rarely a measure or a simple extrapolation of expressed or latent needs of customers in the past. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Genentech, Virgin Group, Amazon, Southwest Airlines etc. are examples of great companies who have held true to their vision. They have not pivoted. Why? Because the leaders (for the most part- the founders) had a very clear and aspirational vision of the future! They did not subject themselves to sudden pivots driven by the “animal spirits” of the customers. They have understood that deep waters run still, despite the ripples and turbulence on the surface. They have honed and reflected upon consumer behavior and economic trends, and have given significant thought before they pulled up the anchor. They designed and reflected upon the ultimate end before they set sail. And once at sea, and despite the calm and the turbulence, they never lost sight of the aspirational possibilities of finding new lands, new territories, and new cultures. In fact, they can be compared to the great explorers or great writers – search for a theme and embark upon the journey …within and without. They are borne upon consistency of actions toward attainment and relief of their aspirations.

Now we are looking at the millennial generation. Quick turnarounds, fast cash, prepare the company for an acquisition and a sale or what is commonly called the “flip” … everything is super-fast and we are led to believe that this is greatness. Business plans are glibly revised. This hotbed of activity and the millennial agility to pivot toward short-term goal is the new normal — pivot is the concept that one has to be ready for and adopt quickly. I could not disagree more. When I hear pivots … it tells me that the founders have not deliberated upon the long-term goals well. In fact, it tells me that their goals are not aspirational for the most part. They are what we call in microeconomic theory examples of contestable agents in the market of price-takers. They rarely, very rarely create products that endure and stand the test of time!

So now let us relate this to organizations and people. People need stability. People do not seek instability – at least I can speak for a majority of the people. An aspirational vision in a company can completely destabilize a certain market and create tectonic shifts … but people gravitate around the stability of the aspirational vision and execute accordingly. Thus, it is very important for leadership to broadcast and needle this vision into the DNA of the people that are helping the organization execute. With stability ensured, what then happens are the disruptive innovations! This may sound counter-factual! Stability and disruptive innovations! How can these even exist convivially together and be spoken in the same breath! I contend that Innovation occurs when organizations allow creativity upon bedrock of discipline and non-compromising standards. A great writer builds out the theme and let the characters jump out of the pages!

When you have mediocrity in the vision, then the employees have nothing aspirational to engage to. They are pockets sometimes rowing the boat in one direction, and at other times rowing against one another or in a completely direction. Instability is injected into the organization. But they along with their leaders live behind the veil of ignorance – they drink the Red Bull and follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin. So beware of the pivot evangelists!

The Balanced Scorecard Model (BSC) was introduced by Kaplan & Norton in their book “The Balanced Scorecard” (1996). It is one of the more widely used management tools in large organizations.

One of the major strengths of the BSC model is how the key categories in the BSC model links to corporate missions and objectives. The key categories which are referred to as “perspectives” illustrated in the BSC model are:

Financial Perspective:

Kaplan and Norton do not disregard the traditional need for financial data. Timely and accurate data will always be a priority, and managers will do whatever necessary to provide it. In fact, often there is more than enough handling and processing of financial data. With the implementation of a corporate database, it is hoped that more of the processing can be centralized and automated. But the point is that the current emphasis on financials leads to the “unbalanced” situation with regard to other perspectives. There is perhaps a need to include additional financial-related data, such as risk assessment and cost-benefit data, in this category.

Customer Perspective

Recent management philosophy has shown an increasing realization of the importance of customer focus and customer satisfaction in any business. These are leading indicators: if customers are not satisfied, they will eventually find other suppliers that will meet their needs. Poor performance from this perspective is thus a leading indicator of future decline, even though the current financial picture may look good. In developing metrics for satisfaction, customers should be analyzed in terms of kinds of customers and the kinds of processes for which we are providing a product or service to those customer groups

Internal Business Process Perspective

This perspective refers to internal business processes. Metrics based on this perspective allow the managers to know how well their business is running, and whether its products and services conform to customer requirements (the mission). These metrics have to be carefully designed by those who know these processes most intimately; with our unique missions these are not necessarily something that can be developed by outside consultants. My personal opinion on this matter is that the internal business process perspective is too important and that internal owners or/and teams take ownership of understanding the process.

Learning and Growth Perspective

This perspective includes employee training and corporate cultural attitudes related to both individual and corporate self-improvement. In a knowledge-worker organization, people — the only repository of knowledge — are the main resource. In the current climate of rapid technological change, it is becoming necessary for knowledge workers to be in a continuous learning mode. Metrics can be put into place to guide managers in focusing training funds where they can help the most. In any case, learning and growth constitute the essential foundation for success of any knowledge-worker organization.

Kaplan and Norton emphasize that ‘learning’ is more than ‘training’; it also includes things like mentors and tutors within the organization, as well as that ease of communication among workers, the engagement of the workers, the potential of cross-training that would create pockets of bench strength and switch hitters, and other employee specific programs that allows them to readily get help on a problem when it is needed. It also includes technological tools; what the Baldrige criteria call “high performance work systems.”

Innovation Perspective

This perspective was appended to the above four by Bain and Company. It refers to the vitality of the organization and its culture to provide the appropriate framework to encourage innovation. Organizations have to innovate. Innovation is becoming the key distinctive element in great organizations, and high levels of innovation or innovative thinking are talent magnets.

Taking the perspectives a step further, Kaplan and Cooper instituted measures and targets associated with each of those targets. The measures are geared around what the objective is associated with each of the perspectives rather than a singular granule item. Thus, if the objective is to increase customer retention, an appropriate metric or set of metrics is around how to measure the objective and track success to it than defining a customer.

One of the underlying presumptions in this model is to ensure that the key elements around which objectives are defined are done so at a fairly detailed level and to the extent possible – defined so much so that an item does not have polymorphous connotations. In other words, there is and can be only a single source of truth associated with the key element. That preserves the integrity of the model prior to its application that would lead to the element branching out into a plethora of objectives associated with the element.

Objectives, Measures, Targets and Initiatives

Within each of the Balance Scorecard financial, customer, internal process, learning perspectives and innovation perspectives, the firm must define the following:

Strategic Objectives – what the strategy is to achieve in that perspective

Measures – how progress for that particular objective will be measured

Targets – the target value sought for each measure

Initiatives – what will be done to facilitate the reaching of the target?

As in models and analytics, the information that the model spouts could be rife with a cascade of metrics. Metrics are important but too many metrics associated with the perspectives may diffuse the ultimate end that the perspectives represent.

Hence, one has to exercise restraint and rigor in defining a few key metrics that are most relevant and roll up to corporate objectives. As an example, outlined below are examples of metrics associated with the perspectives:

The link above contains a number of templates and examples that you may find helpful.

I have discussed organization architecture and employee engagement in our previous blogs. The BSC is a tool to encourage engagement while ensuring a tight architecture to further organizational goals. You may forget that as an employee, you occupy an important place in the ecosystem; the forgetting does not speak to your disenchantment toward the job, neither to your disinclination toward the uber-goals of the organization. The forgetting really speaks to potentially a lack of credible leadership that has not taken the appropriate efforts to engage the organization by pushing this structure that forces transparency. The BSC is one such articulate model that could be used, even at its crudest form factor, to get employees informed and engaged.

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